Tag: First world war

Precipice by Robert Harris

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Robert Harris’ 2024 novel Precipice is a clever mixture of history and fiction. Britain’s prime minister in 1914, Henry Asquith, married with grown-up children, had some sort of relationship with a much younger woman, Venetia Stanley. That much is fact, because his letters to her survive. Her replies do not and that is what gives Harris the space to create a story about what may have been going on. Asquith’s letters make clear that he had got into the habit of confiding in her about government business and even sending her confidential documents.

Asquith was also in the habit of taking her for drives in his car, the blinds drawn and the chauffeur unaware of what was happening just behind him. He screws up an official telegram and casually throws it out of the window. It is found and handed in by a member of the public and an investigation into a possible security breach is started by the early version of what is now MI5.

There is a powerful sense of the pressure Asquith was under, first to try and find a solution for Ireland and then as events led inexorably to Britain’s involvement in the first world war.

The sheer number of letters and their frequency is staggering. This was made possible by the efficiency of the postal service at that time, with several deliveries each day. It feels like a present-day couple communicating by text message. The question being asked here is whether Venetia Stanley was a necessary support to Asquith when he was under huge pressure or a distraction when his mind should have been on other things.

It’s quite astonishing that Asquith might have been so distracted over Venetia that he wasn’t paying full attention when the cabinet was debating whether the Gallipoli operation should go ahead. No less astonishing is that he couldn’t be quite sure what general Sir John French had actually said about the shell supply situation on the western front because he had sent Lord Kitchener’s letter to Venetia.  

It’s a bit similar to Harris’ earlier novel, Munich, in that it’s more of a character study of a prime minister than anything else. Like that novel, it’s packaged as a thriller but it isn’t really, as the spy plot involving a completely fictional character is rather less convincing and seems a bit “bolted on”. The part where the investigator goes undercover to infiltrate the Stanley family home is the most fictional and the least convincing, I feel.

Harris is on firmer ground with his depiction of a time and a particular class of people. Did Asquith and Venetia actually have a physical affair? Harris hints that upper-class girls knew exactly how to go so far and no further. The suggestion is that whatever they were doing in the back of that car, it wasn’t full intercourse.

There are a couple of historical details that I particularly liked. When Venetia takes a job as a nurse, the artist Sir John Lavery comes to the hospital to do a painting in the ward, featuring Venetia and a wounded soldier. This is a description of a real painting. And I hadn’t realised the extent of the anti-German riots after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. Apparently, in Southend, the army was called out to restore order.

Harris is an established and well-connected author, a former Times journalist and something of a political insider. Only someone like that could get the access and necessary permissions from the characters’ descendants to tell a story like this one. I think some of the dialogue seems a bit too modern, but this may be deliberate. The whole situation between Asquith and Venetia feels rather modern. I wondered whether Harris might be trying to draw a parallel with more recent events. Does he have any particular current politician in mind?

But the great strength of this novel is the depiction of how people of that class lived at that time, which is very convincing. When the novel opens, Venetia is a member of a loose group of wealthy young people known as the Coterie. Their cavalier attitude to life is revealed by their reaction to a drowning in the Thames during that carefree summer of 1914.

This world is created so vividly that the historical note at the end about the decline of the Stanley family is rather sad: “Venetia died in 1948 at the age of sixty. By then, the Stanley family’s fortunes were in steep decline. Today, Alderley Park no longer exists; all that remains of Penrhos House are parts of the walls and corner towers, mostly overgrown with ivy, hidden in the woods.”

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

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Dreamers is one of Sassoon’s less well-known war poems. It was written in 1917, after he had made his declaration against the war and been sent to Craiglockhart hospital. It strongly evokes the contrast between the soldiers’ present day in the trenches, in which they seem to be already dead, and their imaginings of the past. It seems impossible for them to ever return to their former lives.

I wonder whether it might have been an influence on Philip Larkin’s MCMXIV (1914), published in 1964. The imagery of pre-war innocence is rather similar.

And although that imagery may be different now, there are volunteer soldiers out there, perhaps thinking rather similar thoughts as I write this.

Dreamers by Siegfried Sassoon

Soldiers are citizens of death’s grey land,
   Drawing no dividend from time’s to-morrows.
In the great hour of destiny they stand,
   Each with his feuds, and jealousies, and sorrows.
Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win
   Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives.
Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin
   They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives.

I see them in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,
   And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain,
Dreaming of things they did with balls and bats,
   And mocked by hopeless longing to regain
Bank-holidays, and picture shows, and spats,
   And going to the office in the train.

Grass by Carl Sandburg

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I don’t think Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) is as widely read in the UK as he has been in his native United States. Perhaps his declamatory, free verse style is more of an American taste. I had never even heard of him when I saw this poem displayed in a tube train carriage as part of the Poems on the Underground initiative some years ago. I think it was published in 1918.

What brought it back into my mind more recently? I think it must have been an article about the Ukraine war that I read not long ago, illustrated with a photograph of a trench that could have come from the first world war.

Nothing changes, I thought and that is the message of this poem. War seems to be a permanent part of the human condition. People forget. They don’t like to think about it, so nothing changes. The personification of the grass in this straightforward and direct poem represents the process of forgetting.    

Grass by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
                                             I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
                                            What place is this?
                                            Where are we now?

                                            I am the grass.
                                            Let me work.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

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I found this poem printed in a copy of The Old Front Line by John Masefield. It’s quite appropriate that it should be there because it uses a similar conceit. Just as Masefield describes the 1916 Somme battlefield from an imagined future after the war has ended, High Wood imagines the old trenches becoming a tourist attraction in peacetime.  

John Stanley Purvis wrote it under his pseudonym of Philip Johnstone in 1918. He served as a lieutenant in the war and was invalided out of the army after the battle of the Somme. It took the British three months to capture the German stronghold of High Wood in that battle.

He is not particularly well-known among the Great War poets, but deserves to be remembered for this striking poem. Its realistic and cynical tone still seems modern, resembling the work of Siegfried Sassoon, perhaps, rather than any of the other famous names.

It’s a reminder of how the first world war is the dividing line between two different ways of thinking about war and that after poems like High Wood, it was no longer possible for the more heroic sort of war poems, such as those by Tennyson or Newbolt, to be written.   

The poem has gained in force, because today we can see that exactly what he predicted came true. And after all this time tourists still visit the first world war battlefields.

High Wood by John Stanley Purvis (Philip Johnstone)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,
Called by the French, Bois des Fourneaux,
The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,
July, August and September was the scene
Of long and bitterly contested strife,
By reason of its High commanding site.
Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees
Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench
For months inhabited, twelve times changed hands;
(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.
It has been said on good authority
That in the fighting for this patch of wood
Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,
Of whom the greater part were buried here,
This mound on which you stand being…
                                                            Madame, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch
Or take away the Company’s property
As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale
A large variety, all guaranteed.
As I was saying, all is as it was,
This is an unknown British officer,
The tunic having lately rotten off.
Please follow me – this way…
                                                the path, sir, please,

The ground which was secured at great expense
The Company keeps absolutely untouched
And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide
Refreshments at a reasonable rate.
You are requested not to leave about
Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,
There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

1918

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

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Siegfried Sassoon was already well-known as a war poet when Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was published in 1928. Despite the title, it’s not really a memoir, but a journey from innocence to experience better described as autobiographical fiction or fictionalised autobiography. It is one of the works that helped to create the myth of the long Edwardian summer before the first world war, when in reality that period was one of social change and political uncertainty. Be that as it may, much of what is depicted here was swept away for ever by the war.

This is the story of George Sherston, a young man who has grown up as an only child living with his aunt. He has a modest private income and drops out of Cambridge to concentrate on what he calls his “career as a sportsman”. He devotes his time to fox-hunting and playing cricket in the peaceful, ordered and class-conscious world of rural Kent.

These activities may not hold much appeal for modern readers, but what makes this book such a good read and so memorable is the wonderfully poetic and evocative prose in which Sassoon depicts the countryside. The language is straightforward and precise. Sassoon has the poet’s instinct for exactly the right word. The smell of the air, the change of the seasons, the play of light over the landscape; it is all here, like the literary equivalent of a picture by Eric Ravilious.

This is a world in which Sherston can take his horse to a hunt in another part of the county on a slow steam train that stops at every station. A journey of twenty miles or so is an adventure and trips to London are rare. He delights in being on horseback early in the morning, experiencing the outdoors as those who must work in offices for a living cannot.   

He is completely satisfied with the limited horizons of this small but idyllic world. He accepts the social system and the way things are. He has no thoughts about any future career, or indeed the future in any form. He records his youthful triumphs, such as his innings in the flower show cricket match. This is surely one of the greatest of all literary cricket games and that chapter preserves for ever village social life at that time. There is also his winning ride in the Colonel’s Cup steeplechase.

Yet this is written in such a way as to make clear that Sherston is looking back at his youthful and rather innocent self from some distance in time, with a warm yet slightly critical eye: “All the sanguine guesswork of youth is there, and the silliness; all the novelty of being alive and impressed by the urgency of tremendous trivialities.” I have the feeling that this aspect of the book was influenced by Proust.

There are sly hints, too, of the war that is to come. There are several references to the great enemy of the hunter when jumping a hedge, barbed wire, and the Boer war is mentioned here and there.

Sherston is a slight outsider in this almost feudal set-up, where most of the hunters are farmers or landowners. His modest private income is not really enough to finance the life he aspires to. He moves in a largely male world, and seems to have no interest in meeting young ladies. He has intense male friendships, for example with Denis Milden, the young master of foxhounds. How the reader interprets this might depend on their knowledge of Sassoon’s life. It has to be said that Sherston is not quite Sassoon. He does not write poetry for example.       

By the later part of the book, Sherston is in the army. He experiences social embarrassment when he finds that most of the officers are men he knows from fox-hunting. He pulls some strings to become an infantry officer himself. It is not really made clear why, with his experience of horses, he does not join the cavalry.

By the end, Sherston has experienced the reality of war on the Western Front. Two of his friends have been killed in action and his aunt’s groom, Jim Dixon, the man who put him on a horse in the first place and encouraged his riding endeavours, has died of pneumonia in the trenches.

Sherston’s darker and grimmer wartime experiences are continued in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.

We are now a long way from the earlier part of the book when Sherston told us: “My memory of that summer returns like a bee that comes buzzing into a quiet room where the curtains are drawn on a blazing hot afternoon.”

The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling

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I’m always aware, writing these pieces, that I’m trying to point people in the direction of stories, novels and poems they may not have read. I try to avoid spoilers as much as I can for that reason. I’m faced with a bit of a quandary here, because it’s difficult to say anything at all about The Gardener by Rudyard Kipling without giving away too much and spoiling the effect of reading it for the first time.

I’ll just say that this 1925 story of first world war bereavement is one of Kipling’s most powerful. It’s quite short for a Kipling story of this period, only about fifteen pages, and this concentrates the effect. Any selection of his best stories tends to include it, and rightly so, I think.

It was collected in volume form in Debits and Credits, Kipling’s first collection to be published after the war had ended. This also contains the stories in which members of a masonic lodge help each other to overcome the psychological scars of the conflict. One of these is the mysterious A Madonna of the Trenches. I don’t think it was an accident that The Gardener was placed at the end of the volume. 

Kipling was a successful man both artistically and financially, but his life was touched by tragedy. His daughter Josephine died of pneumonia at the age of six in 1899. His only son John was posted as missing at the 1915 battle of Loos and his body was not found during Kipling’s lifetime. Kipling later worked for the Imperial War Graves Commission. The Gardener came out of his experience of the war and its aftermath.

There’s a sense in this story that Kipling is speaking to all those who had lost relatives on the western front. One can only imagine what it can have been like to read it when it was first published, in a world where everyone knew somebody who had lost someone.

We can be sure that the details of the visit to the Belgian cemetery are accurate. Kipling lays the scene before us with cinematic detail, the thousands of wooden crosses yet to be replaced by gravestones. How can the main character possibly find the grave she is looking for?

The last page or so of this story packs an emotional punch ensuring that once read, it will never be forgotten. Indeed, the meaning of the story depends on a single word on that last page, which inspires the immediate desire to re-read it, to make sure that one has understood correctly.

Kipling introduced many phrases to the English Language; even now he scores quite highly in a list of quotations. It’s often the case that people know the words but not who wrote them.

How many people know that he was responsible for the poignant inscription that is still visible on so many gravestones in France and Belgium?

“A Soldier of the Great War. Known unto God.”

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

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Following on from my previous post, it appears that Remembrance Day events will now be allowed to go ahead this coming Sunday, as long as they are outdoors and follow social distancing rules. Don’t they usually take place outdoors anyway? I suppose the point is that no church services can take place.

So here is another poem from one of the poets most closely associated with the first world war. It was written in 1917. Graves later gave a more detailed account of the real life incident that inspired the poem in his famous prose memoir, Goodbye to All That. He writes there: “Ghosts were numerous in France at that time”.

Corporal Stare by Robert Graves

Back from the line one night in June,
I gave a dinner at Bethune —
Seven courses, the most gorgeous meal
Money could buy or batman steal.
Five hungry lads welcomed the fish
With shouts that nearly cracked the dish;
Asparagus came with tender tops,
Strawberries in cream, and mutton chops.
Said Jenkins, as my hand he shook,
“They’ll put this in the history book.”
We bawled Church anthems in choro
Of Bethlehem and Hermon snow,
With drinking songs, a jolly sound
To help the good red Pommard round.
Stories and laughter interspersed,
We drowned a long La Bassée thirst —
Trenches in June make throats damned dry.
Then through the window suddenly,
Badge, stripes and medals all complete,
We saw him swagger up the street,
Just like a live man — Corporal Stare!
Stare! Killed last May at Festubert.
Caught on patrol near the Boche wire,
Torn horribly by machine-gun fire!
He paused, saluted smartly, grinned,
Then passed away like a puff of wind,
Leaving us blank astonishment.
The song broke, up we started, leant
Out of the window-nothing there,
Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare,
Only a quiver of smoke that showed
A fag-end dropped on the silent road.

Peace by Walter de la Mare

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Remembrance Sunday is going to be a bit odd this year. The latest lockdown means that the familiar ceremonies at war memorials in towns and villages up and down the country will not now take place. We already knew that the ceremony at the Cenotaph in Whitehall was going to feature the politicians but not the public, and that there would be no march past. That seems a pity, as 2020 marks the centenary of the installation of the permanent memorial in Whitehall.

Here is a poem that does not fall into the usual definition of “first world war poetry”, as it was not written by a combatant and does not deal with life in the trenches. It was published in Walter de la Mare’s 1918 collection Motley.

De la Mare was already in his forties when he wrote it; how must he have felt twenty years later, when the peace he described was about to be shattered once again?  

Peace by Walter de la Mare

Night is o’er England, and the winds are still;
Jasmine and honeysuckle steep the air;
Softly the stars that are all Europe’s fill
Her heaven-wide dark with radiancy fair;
That shadowed moon now waxing in the west
Stirs not a rumour in her tranquil seas;
Mysterious sleep has lulled her heart to rest,
Deep even as theirs beneath her churchyard trees.

Secure, serene; dumb now the night-hawk’s threat;
The guns’ low thunder drumming o’er the tide;
The anguish pulsing in her stricken side….
All is at peace….But, never, heart, forget:
For this her youngest, best, and bravest died,
These bright dews once were mixed with bloody
      sweat.

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

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J L Carr (1912–1994) was definitely not part of the London literary world. In 1967, he retired early from his job as a primary school headteacher and devoted the rest of his life to writing novels, and self-publishing small volumes from his home in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

His 1980 novel A Month in the Country was the nearest he came to mainstream success. It was nominated for the Booker prize and successfully filmed.

It’s an unusual novel by an unusual man. Carr manages to pack more into one hundred or so pages than many novels of twice or three times the length. There are a couple of references to that master of short, intense fiction, Joseph Conrad. It starts quietly but gains in emotional intensity as it proceeds to an ending that may make the reader reflect on their own life.

Set in 1920, it is the story of first world war veteran Tom Birkin’s stay in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. He has been hired to restore a fresco in the local church, long hidden under whitewash and the grime of centuries. In the next field, another ex-soldier, Moon, is working on an archaeological enquiry. Both men are damaged by their war experiences.

Birkin is the narrator and we only gradually realise just how damaged he is, both by the war and the problems in his marriage. We also slowly come to realise that he is looking back at the events he describes, and that they are in a distant past. For example, he laments the decline of the local dialect “because of comprehensive schools and the BBC”.

The conversation with Moon about growing old takes on significance as we realise that Birkin must be narrating this in the present day, where he is now quite elderly.

The novel is a portrait of life in the village at that time, with its division between Chapel and Church, as well as Londoner Birkin’s personal story of his stay in the north.

What is unusual is that the golden, long-lost summer is taking place after the great war and not before it. The timeless rhythms of rural life, and Birkin’s acceptance by the people in the village, are restorative for his troubled soul and the novel becomes, among other things, the story of his recovery.

There is a lot more here, though. The vicar’s wife asks Birkin if he believes in hell. Is hell the mediaeval furnace of demons that is revealed on the church wall? Or is it in this life, in the pain of a loveless marriage and the muddy carnage of Passchendaele? The novel rather confirms my mother’s view that the long decline of Christian belief in Britain started with the first world war. That war cast a long shadow.

The preoccupations here are the timeless ones of English poetry: memory, the passage of time, missed opportunity and the fleeting nature of human experience. Looking back, Birkin realises that his pastoral idyll was taking place at the very end of the horse era. A way of life was coming to a close, yet no-one knew it.

Underlying the romanticism is a hard-headed realism: “If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

 

 

A Private by Edward Thomas

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A poem by Edward Thomas, not so well known, but one of my favourites of his and appropriate for this week. Lest we forget and all that. . . .

 

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors
Many a frosty night, and merrily
Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen and all bores:
“At Mrs Greenland’s Hawthorn Bush,” said he,
“I slept.” None knew which bush. Above the town,
Beyond “The Drover”, a hundred spot the down
In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps
More sound in France – that, too, he secret keeps.